Message to PSE: Start Over and Do It Right

The best hope to kill PSE’s half-baked project is to unite all affected segments against it and support the view of Renton residents who told their City Council PSE needs to go back to the drawing board. None of the current “options” of putting up to 125′-high 230,000 volt transmission lines and towers through dense residential neighborhoods makes any sense. The EMFs, the buzzing sounds, the visual blight, the loss in property values, the negative environmental impacts, the many safety hazards, the tunnel-vision refusal to employ saner, more modern energy options — none of these factors has been thought through by PSE because PSE hasn’t even come up with any kind of design yet!

PSE says it will make a site selection in 2014 and then figure out in 2015 how to deal with it. Is that any way to run a utility required by law to serve the public interest? Meanwhile, the lack of any design gives PSE the convenient excuse to give evasive answers to questions or outright lies when they are pressed for specifics. PSE’s “public outreach” is a sham, orchestrated to pit neighbor against neighbor in a “divide and conquer” strategy.

We should not be bulldozed by PSE into ruining our residential neighborhoods for the sake of the business expansion plans of such behemoths as Microsoft, Google, Boeing, Nintendo, Amazon, PACCAR and others. As a condition for such future development, any major new construction on the Eastside, including high-rises, apartment buildings and malls, should be required to provide gas-generated distributed cogeneration for their own power and heat within a separate grid of their own, independent of the already very insecure national electrical grid.

Our future should foster fewer, not more, ugly overhead electrical transmission lines. Of course, that approach would significantly reduce PSE’s core business and profits for its Australian shareholders, which is what this project is really all about. Time to pursue an eminent domain against PSE and replace it with a Public Utility District responsive only to the public interest?